A Geek Apart

I have been experimenting with working from home for one of my jobs. My reasons are pretty selfish:

• I’m tired of paying over $3.00 a gallon for gas.
• I’m tired of paying vending machine prices for coffee and soda while at work.
• I’m more comfortable at home, thus I am more productive, sort of.
• I am on my own equipment, which has been customized and tweaked for efficiency to no end.
• I see it as a total waste to spend a total of 2 hours from eyes opening to sitting at my desk working when I can just get up and get to work within 20 minutes by staying at home.
• I hate traffic. Unfortunately, I am in the “bubble” of rush hour twice a day, and I cant really adjust my schedule to avoid it.

Now, after this past Friday, I have also noticed some downsides:
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I’m a Mac user, and an avid open-source fan. As such, I feel right at home with a LAMP (or MAMP as it were) stack, and programming procedurally in PHP/MySQL.

Nevertheless, I’m in a sticky situation at work (well, one of my jobs) where I have to install the .NET environment on my Mac. Okay, Parallels to the rescue.

An since the whole OS is getting rather large and hairy, I moved the HDD for the Windows OS to an external travel drive. Done and Done.

Installed Visual Studio 2005. No problems. Set up the SQL Database Server. No Problem.

Tried to open a project that includes CAS authentication. Whoa. Big Problem. The solution proposed was to install IIS. Did that. Then install the .dll and config file provided by my employer. Did that. Still no dice.

How complicated does all this have to be? I mean, they want to develop in this framework, and I dont have any input into that. But seriously. I have a local copy of the web app, and I just want to see a page in a freakin’ browser. Good Lord.

Technorati Tags: programming, windows, iis, web development, microsoft

Producing decent quality technical instruction is not nearly as hard as it used to be.

I recently assisted a coworker in setting up a MySpace page to promote an upcoming student animation competition.

After I set up the page, she still wasn’t quite sure how to use it. To top that off, I was getting ready to start my second job at the university on Monday, so I had to prep everything for a smooth hand-off to another person over the weekend. Time crunch…I’m getting used to that by now.

So I set to work creating some instructional videos on how to use the basic features of Myspace. Things like joining groups, managing messages, adding friends, and the like.

I used Snaps Pro X from Ambrosia to do the video capture on my computer. I narrated what I was doing through a Logitech USB headset, and saved those as short QuickTime videos.
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I just wrapped up on the design and backbone of this site. The very last step? Optimize your images! Not everyone has high speed access, and if you can help speed up the page loading, then do it.

My image folder for the particular site in question was around 3 MB’s. By optimizing my images (exporting in smaller formats, removing unused colors, etc), I was able to shrink that to 80KB. That’s a shrink of 2.7%!

Not only does this speed up page loading for your users, but it cuts down on the bandwidth required. This is important, especially when you, the designer, are also hosting the site.
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So I created a theme for a client about a month ago. It was okay, it was the first, and it worked. Moreover, the customer loved it. That satisfied me.

Then I was approached by another fellow to design a site for him. So, I whipped WordPress out of my handy holster, and set to making a theme.

During the process of making the theme, I had two major priorities: Browser compatability, and a better look than the first one.

Well, I know you’re curious, so go ahead and take a peek. Please be gentle
Major problems I encountered: No png transparency support for IE6 and normal IE6 standards ignorance. I spent the better part of two days tweaking and perfecting my layout for Firefox. Then came time to check it on IE6. Holy crap! What a train wreck!
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